Francesca Randone

07/10/2026
New paper accepted at CSF 2027

Our paper "Approximating Quantitative Information Flow Symbolically with Gaussian-Mixture Semantics", joint work with Raúl Pardo and Andrzej Wąsowski from ITU Copenhagen, was accepted at CSF 2027!

A fundamental challenge in privacy analysis is measuring how much an attacker can infer about a secret from a program's public output: a location, an income, or a medical result. Existing approaches either rely on statistical sampling, which can underestimate leakage, or restrict themselves to discrete domains, where proximity between values is lost.

We propose a static analysis method that quantifies this information leakage symbolically, using a Gaussian Mixture approximation semantics for probabilistic programs. Our method computes exact analytical results or provably sound upper and lower bounds on the Gaussian semantics not only for entropy-based measures but also for g-vulnerability, and not only on discrete but also on continuous domains. Our evaluation on differential privacy and geo-localization shows that our bounds are precise and consistent with numerical estimates.

I think this is a promising step in the continuous landscape for privacy leakage, and it is exciting to see that probabilistic programming can be successfully applied to this domain!

📖 Pre-print soon available

10/09/2026
Talk at Highlights 2026

I gave a talk on the paper "Foundations for Deductive Verification of Continuous Probabilistic Programs: From Lebesgue to Riemann and Back", co-authored by Kevin Batz (Münster Universität), Joost-Pieter Katoen (RWTH Aachen) and Tobias Winkler (RWTH Aachen) as part of the Highlights Conference 2026 hosted in Wien.

15/06/2026
New paper accepted at ISOLA 2026 (REoCAS track)

Our paper "P³MC: Towards Probabilistic Programming-Based Model Checking for Linear Temporal Logic", by Luca Bortolussi, Romina Doz, Laura Nenzi, Francesca Randone, Simone Silvetti and Mirco Tribastone was accepted at ISOLA 2026 in the Rigorous Engineering of Collective Adaptive Systems track!

A fundamental challenge in the analysis of stochastic systems is verifying whether they satisfy temporal properties — for instance, whether a physical process eventually reaches a target region, or remains stable over time. Traditional model checking tools handle this well for discrete systems, but struggle when continuous random variables are involved.

In this paper, we propose a new approach that encodes stochastic dynamical systems as probabilistic programs and leverages their analytical Gaussian Mixture semantics (computed by DEGAS) to estimate — and optimize — the probability that a given temporal property is satisfied, without any Monte Carlo sampling.

Our initial evaluation on on three systems with qualitatively different dynamics shows that both methods can accurately estimate satisfaction probabilities and optimize system parameters to maximize them.

A promising start for bridging model checking of continuous systems and probabilistic programming!

📖 Paper available here

27/05/2026
New paper accepted at PPSN 2026

Our paper "Inferring Structural Causal Models from Data with Grammatical Evolution", by Romina Doz, Francesca Randone, Luca Bortolussi and Eric Medvet was accepted at PPSN 2026!

Understanding cause-and-effect relationships in complex systems is a fundamental challenge in science. While traditional statistics can reveal correlations, causal models go a step further by explicitly mapping how one variable causes another, and not just correlates to it.

In this paper, we tackle the following problem: can we automatically learn causal structures directly from data, without prior knowledge of the underlying system? Our approach couples evolutionary computation in the form of Grammatical Evolution (an algorithm able to generate programs mimicking natural selection) and probabilistic programming to represent causal models in a suitable form.

We show that the approach is able to recover simple causal structures that then combine to form complex models.

📖 Pre-print available at: https://medvet.inginf.units.it/publications/2026-c-drbm-inferring/
👾 Implementation available at: https://github.com/r-doz/Causal_Models_Synthesis

23/04/2026
Invited Seminar at TU Wien

As part of the joint FORSYTE/ISTA seminar series I held a seminar titled "Probabilistic Programming: Semantics and Statistical Perspectives".

22/12/2025
New paper accepted at TACAS 2026

Our paper "DeGAS: Gradient-Based Optimization of Probabilistic Programs without Sampling", by Francesca Randone, Romina Doz, Mirco Tribastone and Luca Bortolussi was accepted at TACAS 2026!

Remember SOGA, our PPL to enable inference of probabilistic programs with continuous and discrete variables?

DeGAS is its evolution, aimed at solving complex optimization problems.

DeGAS augments SOGA syntax with parameters, and applies a semantic smoothing to ensure that the posterior is always differentiable, even in presence of discrete random variables. By doing that, it allows you to optimize the parameters using torch gradient-based optimization. We have used DeGAS to optimize parameters in CPS models observing very nice results. In particular, we were able to optimize complex loss functions, not just standard likelihoods.

📖 Pre-print available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15167
📦 Replication package available at: https://zenodo.org/records/18197807
👾 DeGAS available at: https://github.com/frarandone/DeGAS (repo under active development)

07/10/2026New paper accepted at CSF 2027

10/09/2026Talk at Highlights 2026

15/06/2026New paper accepted at ISOLA 2026 (REoCAS track)

27/05/2026New paper accepted at PPSN 2026